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ExtraBITS for 14-Sep-09

Apple Releases Grand Central Dispatch as Open Source -- Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch is a new technology aimed at helping developers to create applications that take full advantage of multi-core Macs. Apple has now made Grand Central Dispatch available under an Apache open source license, encouraging Linux and Unix developers to adopt it. MacResearch suggests that we might see scientists using Grand Central Dispatch to parallelize code for use on clusters and supercomputers. (Posted 2009-09-14)

AT&T Drops Paging Instructions from Voicemail -- The first victory has been achieved in New York Times columnist David Pogue's "Take Back the Beep" campaign to eliminate wasted seconds in voicemail instructions. AT&T has now trimmed the "To page this person..." bit from their instructions, saving a few seconds that just confused everyone under the age of 45 anyway ("What's a pager, Mom?"). (Posted 2009-09-11)

Subscription Music Comes to iPhone via Rhapsody -- The subscription-based Rhapsody music service from Real Networks is now available as an app for the iPhone and iPod touch. The service lets you listen to an unlimited amount of music from an 8-million song library for $15 per month. The app only streams music; this version can't even download songs temporarily. (Posted 2009-09-10)

MacJury Podcast Discusses Apple Announcements -- TidBITS editors Glenn Fleishman and Jeff Carlson joined Chuck Joiner's MacJury with Adam Christianson, Keith Lang, and Chuck La Tournous to talk about all the news that emerged from Apple's music and iPhone OS announcements. Among the topics covered in part one and part two, we conclude that Norah Jones isn't "rock and roll." (Posted 2009-09-10)

Minding the Line between Humans and Computer -- TidBITS Editor Glenn Fleishman penned this article for The Economist about the state of CAPTCHA, those distorted text images you must enter to post comments or buy tickets online. TidBITS relies on reCAPTCHA for submitting tips and emailing authors. (Posted 2009-09-07)

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